‘The world was made to be inhabited by beasts’
Religio Medici
I SEND YOU THE scull of a poulcats . . . Probably you have none by you.’
Most of us get by well enough without having the skull of a polecat to hand. That Thomas Browne regards such an item as essential – and his blithe confidence in this letter to his physician son Edward that he will regard it so too – is entirely in his character as a student of nature and as a collector of miscellaneous objects. As an article of correspondence between the two Brownes, this is not untypical. Thomas has succeeded in transmitting his passion for the curiosities of nature to his son, for in his dwellings in Salisbury Court off Fleet Street in London Edward also keeps an ostrich. The father is concerned for its well-being and writes on another occasion: ‘I beleeve you must bee carefull of your Ostridge this extreme cold weather least it perish by it being bred in so hot a countrey and perhaps not seen snows before or very seldom.’
Thomas Browne is not what we would call now a nature lover. His interest in animals is dispassionate; he can see and accept that man, too, is part of nature. This makes him gently critical of Christian doctrine, which demands little cognizance of the natural world even as it grants man dominion over it; he is more admiring of ‘the Heathens’ in this respect. So he is seldom to be found watching birds in their habitat. More often, he has specimens brought to him, dead or alive, and he is just as likely to record the taste of a bird as its appearance. Young herons are sometimes served at feasts, but the bittern, he notes, ‘is also comon & esteemed the better dish’. His engagement with nature is coldly scientific, by modern standards even cruel. At one point, he kept an eagle, which he fed on puppies, cats and rats, but did not water, probably as part of an experiment concerning the flesh of certain birds such as the peacock, which might be preserved indefinitely in a dried state for food.
There are expedient reasons for Thomas – and Edward – to be able to distinguish the skull of one species from that of another or to recognize a sweet flag or a cicada when he sees one. The correct identification of animals and plants is essential when they are used as sources of medicines. There are also signs of divinity to be decoded in God’s creation. But chiefly, I feel, it is for the sheer pleasure of knowledge that Thomas describes the natural riches he finds around him.
Notes and Letters on the Natural History of Norfolk is a partial catalogue of birds and fishes (including a few aquatic mammals) to be found in the county and its waters. It was not conceived as a book by Browne, but was assembled posthumously from letters written to Christopher Merret, a physician and one of the founding fellows of the Royal Society, who was preparing a complete natural history of England. Browne’s list is not exhaustive; the species chosen must be those that most interested him or that he thought would be unfamiliar to Merret in London.
The project placed Browne in a classical tradition he was familiar with. He often cites the natural histories produced by Aristotle, Claudius Aelianus and Pliny the Elder – despite this last work being the original source of many of the ‘vulgar errors’ concerning the natural world that Browne seeks to set right elsewhere. Their medieval and Renaissance successors, the thirteenth-century German friar Albertus Magnus, and later the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, the French traveller Pierre Belon and others, produced volumes that were progressively more complete and more reliable. Such work laid the foundations for Linnaeus, whose Latin binomial system of naming plants and animals at last established order and eliminated confusion between species described in different languages.
Browne’s ambition was more modest – to describe the local species in a way that others would find helpful. Even so, he was making an important new kind of record. The Natural History of Norfolk gives English names to the shearwater and the merganser for the first time. He also names the mistle thrush from the berries it feeds on. From well beyond the coasts of Norfolk, he appropriates from Scandinavian languages the name of the narwhal, which features in his lively discussion of the existence or otherwise of unicorns in Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Other creatures he gave common names to range from the expressive praying mantis to the minimally described red spider, which later science has shown not to be a spider at all but a species of mite.
Browne’s investigations into the natural world ran well beyond the naming of species, however. He was greatly interested in how animals came into the world, and investigated the ways in which eggs responded to various substances with such scientific thoroughness that he earned the praise of Joseph Needham, a later pioneer of chemical embryology. He was the first to use the words amphibious, to describe creatures that live both on land and in the water, as well as oviparous and viviparous (meaning egg-laying and giving birth to live young, respectively).
It is hard in these days of images transmitted in an instant to recapture the sheer hunger for knowledge that has Browne prepared to ride across the county in order to see a beached whale or send a man out into the marshes with a shotgun in order to bring back the corpse of some rare specimen for display or dissection. We are accustomed to having our nature delivered to us with less effort – the drive-by nature of a raptor glimpsed from a car window, the packaged nature of hour-long television programmes. We sit on the sofa imbibing the sweet concentrate of the BBC’s Springwatch rather than stepping outside the back door.
I have a regular walk that I take when I feel I have earned a break from work. It is a loop of three miles or so with habitats as varied as can be managed within the narrow limits imposed by the Norfolk topography. It begins down the loke by the side of my house, which leads to the edge of a soggy riverside pasture. I follow the fields that border the river, where the farmer has given his grudging consent to my presence, still mistrustful of anybody on his land for whatever reason. I cut across another piece of rough grazing land, then onto a country road over the river, past well-tended gardens, through a churchyard, and over the river again, this time on a warped wooden footbridge, and back along the old railway path. If I am lucky I don’t see another person.
I call it the twenty-five-bird loop. It is not a study on the scale of Gilbert White’s parish of Selborne in Hampshire. Nor is it quite Charles Darwin’s ‘sand-walk’ around the little wood he planted at his house in Kent, where he made circuits that gave him time to think. Twenty-five species of birds seen during the hour or so the walk takes me is par for the course. I see more on a cold day, and would see more still if I permitted myself to go first thing in the morning. I see fewer birds if it is windy, as it often is, or if it is a hot afternoon. The varied habitat helps boost the count, and so does the fact that most of the walk runs along edges – edges between land and water, between cultivation and wildness – for it is at the edges where animals prosper, able to shuttle quickly between food and shelter.
I have built up a rough expectation of what I will see where as I make my circuit. The same nest sites and roosts are used year after year. I am beginning to be able to predict the days of departure of the swifts and swallows and the arrival of the fieldfares and redwings. It is not a walk made for rarities. I am mostly content to see the ordinary pattern repeat itself with minor variations. But of course there have been exceptional sightings. Briefly, one bitter winter’s day, three whooper swans rested on the bare field. Another time, a marsh harrier swooped across it looking for a service-station snack en route between the reed beds of the Broads and the north Norfolk coast. I have seen the rare water rail and, once, the even rarer red-backed shrike – a male in full plumage perching in full sunlight. I waited for it to do the shrike’s thing of skewering an insect on a thorn for later consumption, but it only emitted repeated creaking noises, waiting for me to go away.
I also observe what crops go into the fields, what chemicals go onto them, and what contestable vermin the farmer has been shooting. I do not have in my house the skull of a polecat, but I do have the skull of an American mink, whose body I found one day on this walk, having been executed marksman-style neatly shot through the head.
Browne chose his county well for natural history. Norfolk is a large county with a very long coast that bulges out into the North Sea. It is the first landfall for birds windblown from the east, and its mudflats and marshes provide rich winter feeding grounds for geese, ducks and waders. Browne’s global sensorium – his lofty view of the world – is in evidence once again, since he is one of the first naturalists to insist that many species are annual migrants, a realization that must surely have come from observing large flocks moving along the Norfolk coast in the spring and autumn months. Some birds land so exhausted on the coast that it is possible to take them with dogs or simply to club them to death, he reports; they must have flown long distances over the sea to arrive in this sorry state. Until the idea of long-distance migration was accepted more than a century later, people believed, in one of the greatest of ‘vulgar errors’, that swallows, for example, hibernated at the bottom of ponds.
Though Norfolk is famously low-lying, it is nevertheless rich in habitats, including forest, fen, marsh, saltings and wetland as well as grazing fields and arable land. Much of this environment, and especially the shore, is not much changed from what Browne knew, although today the positive effect of managing coastal habitats for wildlife is countered by the intensive agriculture that prevails inland. For this reason, the species noted by Browne that are no longer common are birds of the inland heaths now turned to prairies of barley and sugar beet.
The most recent edition of Browne’s Natural History of Norfolk that is not part of a collected works was published in 1902, and carries a knowledgeable introduction and footnotes by a local ornithologist named Thomas Southwell. These comments provide a useful interpolation between Browne’s century and our own, whereby we can trace the long-term progress of many local birds. Some that were relatively common are barely clinging on – the stone curlew, one of those species of the inland heaths, that was ‘still far from rare’ in 1902 is now quite definitely rare. Even the starlings, which Browne found ‘remarkable in their numerous flocks’, are now so diminished in numbers they can hardly muster a murmuration.
Other species have undergone a more complicated change in fortunes. Browne describes the avocet, with its smart white-and-black plumage and upturned bill – ‘so that it is not easie to conceive how it can feed’ – as ‘not unfrequent’ in the Norfolk marshes. But Southwell’s footnote describes it as ‘another bird which formerly frequented the marshy districts of Norfolk at the breeding time, but which has now been lost to us’, not seen since 1818, he adds, their feathers apparently much prized by fly-fishermen. Today, though, the avocet is once again quite common year-round, the apt symbol for the campaigning success of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. At the RSPB’s Titchwell nature reserve on the north Norfolk coast there is a path to one of the hides that is dug out like a First World War trench so that visitors will not disturb the birds and the avocets swoop extravagantly about your head as you walk along it.
The Natural History of Norfolk does not count as one of Browne’s great literary achievements. It is little more than a list of kinds, with each given just enough description to make identification unambiguous. But it gives us a little context as to why particular species were valued and how man saw himself in relation to them; Browne often includes a note that jars with us today as to a creature’s likely fate. Knots, huge flocks of which still gyrate like wafts of smoke over the low-tide sands of the Wash in winter, are netted and then fattened by candlelight for the table, for example. Rooks are sold in Norwich market, their livers used in the treatment of rickets. And ‘Godwyts [are] accounted the dayntiest dish in England.’
Things have changed. We no longer eat these birds. We now consume them visually. Yet this altered relationship to the natural world is just as pathological in its way. The short bestiary that follows is drawn from creatures that Browne lists in his natural history or that he discusses in Pseudodoxia Epidemica because people once believed foolish things about them. It describes the creatures themselves, but it becomes a dissection of how we see nature now.
The avocet is the logo bird of the RSPB. But I have noticed that in Norfolk the ostrich vies with it as an emblematic presence. There is such a number of Ostrich Inns that you might suppose the bird once ran across the open heaths of the county in search of liquid refreshment. When I asked local people about this, nobody was able to explain it, and they seemed never to have noticed the signs. I eventually traced the motif to a story involving the Norfolk-born Sir Edward Coke, who became the admired attorney general of Elizabeth I (appointed over Francis Bacon) and James I, and whose family seat was later at Holkham Hall. He adopted the emblem of an ostrich with a horseshoe in its beak, a cliché of medieval bestiaries. As a lawyer, it seems he identified with this creature that was reputed to be able to digest the hardest things. To the ostrich, there is nothing especially significant about iron. The bird is merely looking for hard stones for its gizzard, and as an exceptionally large animal it is able to swallow large pieces which might well include nails and even fragments of horseshoes.
To start with, Browne is inclined to discredit the belief that an ostrich will digest iron. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica he confesses he has not had the opportunity to do the experiment; instead he cites his preferred ancient authorities, such as Pliny and Aelian, who make no mention of such a curious habit, but surely would have done so if they had known of it, and others who have refuted the tale by experiment, such as Aldrovandi, who witnessed an ostrich ingest iron but then spit it out again.
Long after the last edition of Pseudodoxia Epidemica has been published, Edward Browne, by now a physician at the royal court, acquires one of the birds, from a flock given to Charles II. Thomas is eager for Edward to tell him all about it: whether it tucks its head under its vestigial wing to sleep, whether it is attentive to disturbance in its environment like a goose, whether it is terrified of horses or avoids bay leaves. And he suggests that his son puts to the test the willingness of the bird to digest iron – perhaps he should wrap a piece in pastry as an inducement. The results are not on record.
On my birthday I learn that a roller has been spotted in the unappealing environs of the Edgefield dump near Holt. Thomas Browne was the first to record a roller in the British Isles. On a loose sheet of paper included with his letters to Merret he notes: ‘On the xiiii of May 1664 a very rare bird was sent mee kild about crostwick wch seemed to bee some kind of Jay.’ He describes its glorious plumage in detail – ‘violet’, ‘russet yellowe’, ‘azure’, ‘greenish blewe’, ‘bright blewe’, ‘the lower parts of the wing outwardly of browne inwardly of a merry blewe’ and other shades of blue. A Latin name Garrulus Argentoratensis has been added in a different ink and pen at a later date once Browne has had a chance to locate the name assigned to the bird by Aldrovandi. But he calls it a ‘Parret Jay’.
I have only seen one once before, in southern France, but I have a vivid memory of its appearance from the bird books of my childhood, where it formed a dazzling triptych with the hoopoe and the bee-eater, making something like a colour insert among the pages of tweedier common species. The bird has been there a week by the time I hear of it. Apparently, thousands of twitchers have responded to their alerts and have descended en masse in their 4x4s. I realize now that this explains why a field that is normally empty has been full of parked cars. But I did not guess the reason in time, and so I have not seen the bird.
I am not one of this breed. I rejoice to spot a rarity on my walk or in my garden, but hardly any more than I do to see a conspiracy of long-tailed tits skittering through the bushes ahead of me on a winter’s day or a yellowhammer singing from the top of a tree. I disapprove of those people who keep pagers and are prepared to tear across the country on news of the sighting of some exotic ‘accidental’. We have no true perspective on the cost of our actions in relation to nature, and nor did Browne. The hoopoe, or ‘Upupa or Hoopebird so named from its note’ he calls ‘a gallant marked bird wch I have often seen & tis not hard to shoote them’. Which is, of course, one reason why it is now a rare thing to see a hoopoe in Britain.
Edgefield dump is a blight on the landscape, casting plastic bags far downwind when a gale blows and always leaking a stinking miasma, which can be seen pouring through the chain-link fence around the site. It is also an attraction for birds. A few years ago, a glaucous gull joined the thousands of other gulls wheeling over the refuse, and this too brought in the twitchers. This year, I have noticed a single red kite there – the first I have seen in Norfolk. It is a joy to watch, one of the few birds that can give the gulls flying lessons, fanning and dipping its tail to make extravagant course corrections seemingly just for the fun of it. Common in London in Browne’s day as scavengers, although less so in Norwich, where Browne tells us they were outdone by the ravens, kites were lost from Norfolk by the 1830s and almost wiped out from Britain as a whole through the twentieth century. However, an astonishingly successful programme of reintroduction begun in 1989 has seen the kite population increase almost eightfold since 1995. In the Chilterns, they now swarm like pests. Nobody has yet brought back the ravens.
Bitterns are not susceptible to rapid-response birdwatching. They are not gaudy and they are not exotic foreign guests. They are, on the contrary, extraordinarily well camouflaged and extraordinarily particular about their habitat – large freshwater areas of common reed. A single male’s territory may cover as much as twenty hectares of this kind of land, and this makes it a characteristic bird of the Norfolk fens, marshes and broads. Nevertheless, bitterns were locally extinct by the mid-nineteenth century. They began to make a tentative recovery in the early twentieth century when the first nature reserves were created, but then went into decline again because of pollution and boat traffic. Now, numbers are slowly climbing again thanks to closer management of habitats and even the costly creation of new inland areas of reed bed which will not be vulnerable to saltwater contamination in the event of storm surges and rising sea levels.
I never knew the bittern until I came to Norfolk, and even then it was some years before I saw one. At first, I only heard them. Their sound is universally described in bird guides as ‘booming’, which suggests a stentorian bird. But on the rare occasions when it has reached me across a Norfolk marsh, it has always been a softer, almost subsonic permeation of the air, like a distant foghorn, or the sound made when blowing across the neck of an empty bottle. Browne describes how Norfolk people believed this ‘mugient noise, or as we term it Bumping’, was made by the bird using the reeds among which it lived, presumably by blowing them like a bassoon. The delightfully onomatopoeic ‘mugient’ is another of Browne’s gifts to the English language, taken from the Latin verb mugire, meaning ‘to bellow’. He sought to disprove the story by keeping a bittern in the yard of his house in Norwich. He denied it reeds, but the bird, perhaps lovelorn in any case, never made a sound.
Our interventions in the name of conservation are well meaning but often clumsy. Barn owls are another species which have made Norfolk a relative stronghold. Browne points out that owls, along with ravens, have long been regarded as ‘ominous appearers’, associated with Roman auguries. But I have always been happy to see an owl. A night-time drive of even a few miles without an owl – barn, tawny, little – is a disappointment. More often, because roadside verges make good hunting grounds, I see a few, and can estimate the extent of their territories, which are even larger than the bittern’s.
In Norfolk, however, the barns where they often prefer to nest have usually been converted into human homes. Following the exhortations of the RSPB, I built an owl box and positioned it low in a large beech tree, carefully oriented in the correct direction. I cut away low branches that might impede the flight path of any bird that wished to take up residence. But I never saw an owl use it. Later, the tree died and stood bare for a year or more before it was felled by a January gale. Inspecting the damage, I found a barn owl crushed in the wreckage of the box. Perhaps I had helped it survive a few winters. Perhaps I had only hastened its death.
The fish of the sea are harder to catalogue for they live ‘in an element wherein they are not so easely discoverable’. Browne prefaces his own list by stating his conviction that the number of kinds is very great – Pliny surely came up short when he stopped at 176 species. But even he cannot believe species numbers are so great that many of them are yet to be discovered. We know now that Browne, while wise enough not to pluck a number from the waves, was still highly conservative in his guesswork. We are always apt to take what we know and assume we know it all. There are 221,000 known (eukaryotic) species in the sea according to the World Register of Marine Species, a figure that is subject to magnification when new discoveries are made, as well as to trimming when it is found, as it quite often is, that a single species has been going under several different names. Furthermore, by looking at the rates of discovery within different animal groups, scientists are able to use statistical methods to estimate the overall number of species yet to be found. According to the latest calculations, for every known marine species there are still ten more waiting to be identified – more than two million species in all.
Browne’s list reflects the sea as a larder: mullet, gurnard, plaice, sole, turbot – ‘the great Rhombus’ – mackerel and herring, the staple of Yarmouth, ‘Lobster in great number about Sheringham and Cromer from whence all the country is supplyed’, ‘Crabs large & well tasted found also in the same coast’, oysters, mussels, cockles, clams and ‘sea starres’, whose five-fold symmetry he celebrates in The Garden of Cyrus. ‘[O]ur starres exceed not 5 poynts though I have heard that some with more have been found about Hunstanton and Burnham,’ he comments.
In common with other naturalists of the age – Pierre Belon’s illustrated Histoire naturelle des estranges poissons marins of 1551 is his principal guide – Browne is happy to lump all aquatic animals together as fish. His list to Merret includes the first Norfolk record of a common dolphin, although he notes that porpoises are commoner. Both are, of course, mammals. When King Charles II visits Norwich in 1671, Browne anatomizes one of the animals, and Dorothy makes ‘an excellent savory dish of it’. Seals are so abundant they may be ‘often taken sleeping on the shoare’. The seals – common and grey species – were clubbed to death on these shores as recently as the 1960s, but today they bask complacently on the sand in increasing numbers and their pupping has become a tourist attraction during the Christmas holidays. They are mostly left in peace, and their human admirers are watched over in turn by enthusiastic volunteer wardens.
When a sperm whale is washed up on the beach at Wells, Browne is quickly on the scene. His alacrity on these occasions forces me to admit that he would probably be among the pager-users today. He finds a sixty-two-foot creature with a peculiar head projecting over its mouth. It has teeth – ‘the largest about two Pound’ – but no baleen, the bonelike bristles that some whales use to filter food. He recounts the bare fact of the event and others like it – another large whale at Hunstanton twenty years before, and nearby, on another occasion, a pod of eight or nine whales, two of which calved on the shore – in the Natural History of Norfolk. But the sensational detail is reserved for Pseudodoxia Epidemica, where the stranding gives him the opportunity to investigate at first hand the great mystery of spermaceti.
The spermaceti, after which the sperm whale is named, has long been suspected not to be the sperm of the animal. But as to the true nature and purpose of this buoyant, inflammable and valuable substance, nobody really has a clue. Browne goes to the beach out of curiosity, but he is also interested in obtaining his share of ‘that medicall matter’, for the substance is esteemed in the making of ointments. It is likely he has competition in this. The scenario is one we know from prints made by Dutch artists. Jan Saenredam’s 1602 engraving of a whale stranded at Beverwijk shows armies of sightseers advancing on the unfortunate beast, and some even clambering on top of it. In similar prints, people have brought buckets to take away the precious fluid.
Browne inspects the whale as closely as the stench permits. ‘Out of the head of this Whale, having been dead divers days, and under putrefaction, flowed streams of oyl and Sperma-Ceti; which was carefully taken up and preserved by the Coasters. But upon breaking up, the Magazin of Sperma-Ceti, was found in the head lying in folds and courses, in the bigness of goose eggs, encompassed with large flaxie substances, as large as a mans head, in form of hony-combs, very white and full of oyl.’ He takes samples. He roasts some of the flesh and more oil runs out. But other investigations must be forgone. ‘Had the abominable scent permitted, enquiry had been made into that strange composure of the head, and hillock of flesh about it,’ he writes. He wishes he could have examined the bladder, the sphincters of the spout, and the ‘seminal parts’ so that the spermaceti oil at least might be positively distinguished from the actual semen.
Three centuries later, things are not much clearer. Browne’s successor in these enquiries is Malcolm Clarke of the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth, who made a lifelong study of these creatures and their fabled rivals, the giant squid, having obtained his introduction to his subject after the Second World War as a government inspector of the British whaling fleet. Clarke has proposed that whales use their reservoir of spermaceti to control buoyancy, altering its density by controlling the temperature, using water taken in through the whale’s spout to cool the spermaceti to make it denser when diving, and increasing blood circulation to warm it again for surfacing. Others believe that the spermaceti acts as a medium assisting in echo location.
Another Norfolk stranding occurred on Christmas Eve 2011: a sperm whale, some twelve metres in length near the Le Strange Arms at Old Hunstanton. After a couple of days, somebody stole teeth and part of the lower jaw using a chainsaw. By New Year’s Day, the animal had become an attraction for walkers, its jaw half sunken in the sand with a pool of bloody water nearby. There was a large gash in its side from which some fibrous material was escaping. Well-dressed people stood around in clusters as in the Dutch prints. They kept a respectful distance and took photographs. It is thought that the animal was already dead when it was washed up, as there were no signs of struggle. The local authorities decide the body will be left to be washed out to sea on the next spring tides. By the time I get there after the festivities all trace of the creature has been removed. There is not even a mark on the sand where the carcass lay.
The Dutch regarded whale strandings as ominous. The margins of Saenredam’s engraving list a number of further omens and disasters visited upon the Netherlands in the months after the Beverwijk stranding. Whale strandings continue – about 500 cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) might be washed up on British beaches in a typical year – although today we draw subtly different conclusions from this portent. The whale is no longer an emblem of the grounded ship of state or of squandered riches. We read a different loss, the loss that we are inflicting upon nature, and the loss that this in turn threatens to inflict upon our own species. The vast, ungainly mammal, crashing blindly round the planet, is us.
It is alarming at first to find Browne conceding ‘there be many Unicorns’. He means it literally, though – animals with a single horn. The singular name cannot safely be limited to a single creature of a ‘constant shape’.
The problem is that the horns tended to travel without the bodies. They were prize exhibits in the best cabinets of curiosities. Varied in size and colour to suggest that they might originate in many species, they did not conform to the outline of any known animal. The narwhal, which is the rightful owner of a straight, spirally extruded ivory mutation of a tooth, was not fully described until 1685. An inhabitant of Arctic waters, it was an animal that no European but the most intrepid explorer was likely to see alive.
It is understandable that entire creatures are extrapolated (rightly or wrongly) from dislocated parts where those are all that is available. In Wonderful Life, Stephen Jay Gould shows how even qualified scientists can be misled. In the early twentieth century, the paleontologist Charles Walcott painstakingly pieced together a range of likely looking shrimps, worms and trilobites from fossil traces found in the 530-million-year-old Burgess Shale of British Columbia. Sixty years later, a new team was prompted to re-examine Walcott’s results, and found that he had been insufficiently imaginative. Using new evidence, they rearranged the pieces into fantastical new creatures that did not easily fit within the conventional taxonomic groups. One of these was named Hallucigenia, so improbable did it seem, an inch-long monster with a row of seven dorsal tentacles and seven pairs of sharp cones (not unlike unicorn horns in their proportions) which might be legs. Even this may be wrong. Gould considers the possibility that this assemblage might one day prove to be just one complicated part of a larger organism. And in fact, since Wonderful Life was published, new research has suggested that Hallucigenia should at least be flipped over, making its tentacles the legs and its legs into spines. Either way up, like the unicorn, it serves its purpose. ‘We need symbols to represent a diversity we cannot fully carry in our heads,’ Gould writes.
Browne sometimes surprises us with his readiness to credit the existence, at least on some level, of animals we know to be entirely fabulous. Creatures like the griffin, sphinx and chimera he dismisses on the grounds that, like some of the Precambrian creatures of the Burgess Shale, their body parts do not seem to belong together. But the flying horse of Pegasus, the basilisk and satyrs he welcomes because their ‘shadowed moralities requite their substantial falsities’. In other words they are too useful to the stories in which they appear to let them go. In an inconsistency not untypical of Browne, harpies are both discredited as being too improbably cobbled together (they have women’s bodies but birds’ wings, tails and feet), and allowed to ‘exist’ because of their story value.
His predisposition to reason is in constant battle with his love of the fabulous. After pages discussing whether elephants’ legs are jointed (he deduces that they are, on grounds of comparative anatomy, even though their broadly cylindrical shape has led many to believe otherwise), we find this: ‘That some Elephants have not only written whole sentences . . . but have also spoken . . . we do not conceive impossible.’ Not impossible? That elephants speak? The story seems to get in because he finds it in Pliny. In a footnote, he adds that the elephant’s speech was brief: apparently it said: ‘Hoo, hoo.’
It was the Greeks who were responsible for the rumour of the unicorn, which was given scientific authority by Aristotle, who described a kind of ass with a single horn. Pliny was more careful – ‘It is astonishing how far Greek gullibility will go,’ he writes in The Natural History. He based his unicorns on beasts that were at least normally horned, the oryx and the ox. And now at last I can begin to understand how this mythic creature could have grown out of such realities. For among the roe deer that from time to time wander up under cover of the barley to help themselves to the contents of my garden, I occasionally see a young stag with a single antler.
Browne’s difficulty is with the version of the animal that has become stylized in emblems and heraldry. The unicorn was incorporated into the royal coat of arms under James VI of Scotland after his succession to the English throne in 1603. It is on my British passport still. The judgement between what is real and what is fabulous is not easy to make at a time when pictures are automatically credited as true in the way that we once thought photographs were. New tales of strange animals from the Americas, made stranger no doubt by inventive retelling, add to the confusion and to the possibilities. Browne points out, rationally enough, that this unicorn would have great trouble feeding if its horn were as long and angled forward as shown in these pictures. But he is on dangerous ground because the unicorn has the force of biblical truth as well as classical authority behind it. It is to be spotted nine times in the Bible, named but never properly described. There is a vague implication that the creature is special in some way, and in Numbers there are references to its great strength, which suggests a rhinoceros or a mutilated ox. But there is nothing more exact. Even the single horn passes without comment.
I find it a curiosity – one that Thomas Browne might very well have noted – that the mole seems to seek the air above ground when it dies whereas we seek burial in the earth. For occasionally I find a dead one lying on the grass that does not appear to have been attacked by my cats or any other predator. It happens in early summer after dry weather when I would expect them to burrow deep in search of earthworms in moister soil. One morning, I pick up one of these black corpses for closer examination. I find I can peel back the short, soft fur to expose the skin of the head. I uncover the ears, where tufts of fur adhere more tenaciously, but as I work my way down the conical snout, I find no eyes – merely a hint of dimples where eyes ought to be.
This puts me at odds with Browne, who states: ‘that they have eyes in their head is manifest unto any, that wants them not in his own’. I am ashamed at my poor science and hurt by the uncharacteristic tetchiness in my hero’s tone. It is apparently a ‘vulgar error’ to believe that moles are blind. Reading on, though, I am somewhat heartened. Browne’s usual authorities are split on the subject. Aristotle finds eyes but no sight, Pliny and others neither eyes nor sight, Aldrovandi, eyes that see. Two centuries later, Darwin proposed that moles’ eyes are reduced ‘and in some cases quite covered up by skin and fur’. This may be a modification arising out of disuse like the diminutive wings of the flightless dodo, as well as a consequence of natural selection, eyes being positively disadvantageous underground where they would be subject to inflammation from foreign matter entering them.
Modern science remains divided on this ancient question. ‘The facts are incontrovertible – moles are blind,’ the science writer Peter Forbes asserted bravely in 2009. They do, he says, retain the genes necessary for eyes to develop, showing that they have evolved from sighted ancestors. But the results of behavioural experiments in the 1960s suggest otherwise, indicating that although their corneas may be degraded, they do have functioning eyes able to distinguish between light and dark. Apparently, the European mole has open eyes (although you could have fooled me), whereas the Iberian mole has permanently fused eyelids, but in neither animal, according to more recent research, is there evidence that the ocular apparatus is on its evolutionary way out, and it seems that both species are able to detect light and colour. In fact, moles seem to have found ways of avoiding blindness that might be used to address human loss of vision due to corneal and lens defects. He that wants sight in his own eyes may yet have cause to thank the mole.
One cool May afternoon, doing my loop, I see a badger in broad daylight on the long eyot between the ditched field I am walking along and the river. It is as startled as I am, and bustles quickly off into the nettles.
The badger provides a precis of Browne’s method when tackling vulgar errors. People believed that ‘a Brock or Badger hath the legs on one side shorter then of the other’; this was an opinion ‘perhaps not very ancient’ yet ‘very general’, Browne tells us. The story was based on observation of what the poet John Clare would later call the badger’s ‘awkward pace’, followed by wild rationalization as follows: badgers, though lumbering, were seen to be able to run in straight lines along the furrows of ploughed fields, and the only way they could do this was if they were adapted to it by having legs shorter on one side.
Browne uses his full armoury of ‘Authority, Sense, and Reason’, ‘the three Determinators of Truth’, to deal with the problem. Authority goes first. However, he finds that while Albertus Magnus believes it, Aldrovandi does not. (It is remarkable that these rural myths hold sway across a continent.) Browne next employs his senses, and cannot detect the difference himself, even though the country people give him a clue: ‘the brevity by most imputed unto the left,’ he repeats. This is the extent of his visual inspection. He never does the obvious thing of pointing us in the direction of a skeleton we might measure – that is what any dusty scholar would do. What he really wishes to do is get us to use our powers of God-given reason. Look at the ‘total set of Animals’ he instructs: their legs are always the same length on each side. For the badger to be different would simply be ‘repugnant unto the course of Nature’. I am reluctant to settle for this theoretical rationale. It seems uncharacteristically dry. I have a vision of Browne offering more persuasive evidence, perhaps telling how he tethered a badger to a tree and then induced it to circulate in either direction in order to see if it ran better in one or the other.
Another time, I am watching the artist Marcus Coates entering one of his trance-like states in which he claims to speak with animal spirits. He is wearing a badger pelt, and in empathizing with his performance I involuntarily imagine myself doing the same. It takes this imagined substitution to remind me that I have one leg shorter than the other – and in fact the left – a minor deformity unnoticed by doctors and PE teachers, and by me, until in adulthood I learnt to ski and found that I could turn left more smoothly than right because of the difficulty in planting my short leg down the slope.
In 1668, a stork – a rare bird in these isles – is shot on the Norfolk coast near Happisburgh. It is brought to Browne alive with only its wing damaged. He feeds it on snails and frogs, and notes the clattering noise it makes when it snaps its bill together. He draws pictures of it to send to his daughter Elizabeth. Its feet have human-like nails rather than claws, ‘such as Herodotus describeth the white Ibis of Ægypt to have’.
Browne is amused when visitors comment on his acquisition and repeat the superstition that storks prosper only in republics; hopefully, the bird does not foretoken a new commonwealth, they joke. He has already dispatched this error in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, written during England’s own experiment with republicanism, the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. Offering a rare clue to his political sympathies, Browne dismisses the republican stork as no more than ‘a petty conceit to advance the opinion of popular policies’. For good measure, he adds a list of monarchies from ancient Egypt and Thessalia to modern France and Turkey where the bird nests without apparent regard to the system of governance. The Happisburgh stork arrives eight years after the Restoration of the monarchy, and Browne’s satisfaction at the settled national state of affairs is palpable in his letters. With such a reputation hanging round its neck, it is easy to see why a stork arriving on the Norfolk coast, perhaps having flown in from the Dutch Republic, might be shot on sight.
Browne’s list of birds displays a preponderance of long-legged waders, reflecting his interest in helping Merret by ensuring that he includes in his natural history these typical residents of Norfolk’s wetlands that he may not be aware of. Among these species, the largest and most extravagant is the common crane, with its couture smoke-grey plumage, black and white neck and blood-red highlight above the eye. ‘Cranes are often seen here in hard winters especially about the champian & Feildie part it seems they have been more plentifull for in a bill of fare when the maior entertaind the duke of norfolk I meet with Cranes in a dish.’ For this reason, and owing to systematic drainage of the land, the birds quickly became less plentiful and had died out in Norfolk by the end of the seventeenth century.
Today, they are making a cautious return, and a pair or more has bred successfully every year since 1982. More birds join these residents each winter, probably from Scandinavia. For a while, their preferred location was kept secret, but it is hard to keep secret a bird with a wingspan of over two metres that struts about as if auditioning for Strictly Come Dancing. Entirely by chance one day, I see a small flock of them in a winter field of beet tops, fanned out like a police forensic team combing the land for evidence or a body, each picking assiduously from the ground with its massive bill, its rump lifting with the action, allowing its tail feathers to wave in the breeze. There are about fifteen birds, surely enough to comprise a sedge, which is the approved collective noun for a group of cranes. The word has nothing to do with the riverside vegetation of that name. Nor is it, I think, simply an alternative spelling of siege, a military term that applies well to herons, which wait motionless for hours until their prey is forced from cover, but not to the foraging cranes. In Browne’s time a sedge was also a formal assembly of noblemen, and given their stylish appearance and self-important attitudinizing, I feel this is the meaning that best fits these birds.
Cranes are ‘the epitome of wild places,’ according to the naturalist Richard Mabey. Perhaps he has in mind their saurian trumpeting call that can be heard for miles. For the landscape in which I see them is hardly wild. The crane was once a common bird in Britain. Although it is all but absent now, its spirit lives on in up to 300 English place names, such as Cranfield and Cranbrook, more than for any other bird, even the crow. Norfolk contributes a Cranwich and a Cranworth. The crane has much going for it as a focal species for conservation efforts. It is large, beautiful and entertaining. It pulls off the dual miracle of not only seeming exotic, but also of endeavouring to return to places it once called home. Like the kite, it is given a warmer welcome because it was us who first drove it away.
What is this bestiary, this list of animals imagined and real, seen by Browne, seen by me? What meaning should I extract from these fragmentary stories?
The set of real animals and the set of fictional animals do not of course overlap – nothing can be both real and fictional – but nor do they quite form a totality. In between lie other sets: creatures that have gone extinct and that now exist only in memory and as relics and fragments; creatures so rare that most people know nothing of them; and creatures not yet discovered.
Browne can rattle off a list of the notable birds and fishes of Norfolk, but he has no concept of which species might be ‘endangered’. He is clear, though, on the principle of preventing harm. He regrets the prospect of an animal going extinct at man’s hand: ‘it was a vain design, that is, to destroy any species, or mutilate the great accomplishment of six days [i.e. the biblical creation]’. Surprisingly, he does not discuss the dodo, although his Norfolk friend Hamon l’Estrange at Hunstanton saw one in London in 1638. The bird was discovered only in 1598, the last specimen sighted in 1662; by 1681, it was extinct. The last aurochs, a species of wild cattle, was seen in Poland in 1627. The wolf disappeared from the British Isles during Browne’s lifetime. The age of anthropogenic extinctions was hitting its stride. Because they haven’t seen wolves within memory, Browne finds that ‘common people have proceeded into opinions, and some wise men into affirmations’ that the animals are incapable of living in Britain at all. How long does an animal have to be unfamiliar, or fully extinct, before we forget its true niche in nature? Not long, it seems. How long before its only habitat is the tapestry or the printed page where it becomes fabulous?
During ten years or more living in Norfolk, I have observed many variations in animal populations, but I have a hard time making sense of them. I see fewer swallows. I no longer hear the turtle doves that I was delighted to find purring in my garden when I first came here. But there are more buzzards and more Egyptian geese. Little egrets, a now frequent sight on the coast and on inland streams in the winter, were never listed even among the vagrant species in my childhood bird books. They are now well established in much of England, having worked their way steadily northward since their first landfall in Dorset in 1989, a bellwether of cleaner waters or of a warming climate.
I read that there is a thousand-fold increase in the rate of animal extinction above the natural level, owing to man’s hunting, land clearance, urbanization and pollution. This ongoing loss is mostly met, if not with outright apathy, then with despairing resignation. In the space of a few decades, the tense and mood of the discussion have slipped from the present imperative to the past indifferent. A tone of lament is now routine in nature writing, not only in polemical works aiming to draw our attention to the dangers of species loss, but from almost any writer who finds himself or herself out in (more or less) wild surroundings. It is as if this were enough. A proposal called the Memo Project goes a stage further, planning the erection of a ‘beautiful monument to species going extinct worldwide’ on the Isle of Portland, with a bell that will ring for each new extinction. (Memo stands for Mass Extinction Monitoring Observatory.) The intended Donnean message to humanity is clear enough (‘. . . It tolls for thee’), but I find something obscene about this ostentatious mourning too soon substituted for effective remedial action. In writing that I ‘no longer’ hear turtle doves, I realize I have unwittingly joined this lament. In truth, I do not know if ‘no longer’ is the right phrase. The birds have missed several summers (some of them eminently missable), but I suppose they may always return next year. I hope so.
An objective measure of changing biodiversity is hard to achieve. Our scientific censuses and methods of estimating numbers are fairly recent. Before that, we have only the sporadic diaries of naturalists and anecdotal sightings to go by. The recorded loss of an individual species makes for a neat tragic episode, but the pattern of overall losses is both harder to gauge and harder to make into a satisfactory story. Yet with the inability to sense the pattern comes the capacity to deny it. Today, we are in the paradoxical position of knowing that many creatures are going extinct before they have even enjoyed the dubious privilege of being discovered by man. Occasionally, a spectacular new animal is found. In 2013, it was not a unicorn but the olinguito, an arboreal mammal from the forests of Ecuador and Colombia, that was identified by naturalists from the Smithsonian Institution. Although it eats fruit, the olinguito is also carnivorous and so it was classified among the Carnivora, which includes cats and bears, which instantly made it seem a more striking find – the first addition to that order of mammals for more than thirty years. We do not yet know which species went extinct during that year. It may be some creature we never knew.
In Browne’s time, many animals were only known by unreliable verbal reports and artists’ illustrations, whereas now we can observe the intimate lives of obscure species on television. At the same time, we are more physically disconnected from nature than ever, and are maintained in a more subtle kind of ignorance. Nature programmes tell us how to think about animals, but the instruction they give may be no less biased and self-serving than the fables of old. According to Brett Mills, who researches popular television at the University of East Anglia, they may even be a surreptitious means of promulgating normative models of human behaviour. The narration is carefully constructed, pronounced either by an unseen ‘voice of God’, or by a trusted presenter speaking in hushed and reverent tones to camera (evoking thoughts respectively of Eden and church). Camera shots are framed to emphasize the wildness of the environment, carefully excluding the paraphernalia of the film crew and other evidence of human disturbance, tacitly acknowledging that one role of these films is to answer our vicarious lust for wilderness. The overall effect is to deliver an intensity of aesthetic experience quite unlike that to be found in the authentic environment. The action-packed hour of a typical nature programme is an hour that I know I could spend observing a single heron standing motionless on the bank of a stream waiting for prey.
High-definition images tell a low-definition story. The focus is usually on the life and habits of a single species, often a single member of that species. Sometimes, it has even been given a human name. All of this belies the complexity of species interaction and interdependence that is the binding thread in the story of life on earth. The conventions of the narrative arc require certain things to happen within the edited hour: we know that the famously elusive animal will appear eventually, we know we will see the predator catch the prey, but not before we have also seen the prey make a ‘lucky’ escape. There are other tropes, too: the annual migration that is treated as an epic journey; the fight for the fittest to mate and survive; the mutually sustaining relationship that reflects our own ideal of society. When Mills compared the story lines of nature documentaries with accounts of the same animals’ lives in the zoology literature, he also found a disproportionate emphasis on heterosexuality, monogamy and good parenting. Who does not now know about the male penguin that looks after the pair’s lone egg? What a fine role model he is for modern fatherhood. Meanwhile, behaviours that are unacceptable in humans, but that may be perfectly natural in the species under the camera, such as autophagy (eating parts of one’s own body, seen for example in octopuses) and cannibalism (eating others of the same species), are screened in the interests of scientific honesty but accompanied by expressions of appropriate distaste.
The very landscape in which these animals perform their antics has also probably been subject to manipulation. In most places, there is no truly ‘natural’ environment left, only a choice between varieties of human ideas of the natural. Take your pick of our agricultural landscape (England’s green and pleasant land to some, but ‘sheep-wrecked’, in George Monbiot’s word, and reduced to a sterile monoculture), or the intensively managed wetlands of the RSPB, which are from time to time relocated in order to ‘protect’ them, ironically, against natural events such as coastal floods. In his manifesto for ‘rewilding’ the countryside, Monbiot gives unwitting expression to the paradox we face, when he writes with unconscious hubris of ‘allowing’ nature to find its own way towards his chosen utopia. As nature is from time to time apt to remind us, it does not need our permission.
These are our contemporary delusions. The ‘pathetic fallacy’ of the sentimental poets who ascribed human emotions to animals that John Ruskin sought to skewer in 1856 has been extended to a shameless anthropomorphism in almost all mediated presentations of the animal kingdom, from cartoon feature films to supposedly scientific documentaries. In place of the symbolic representation of animals in the emblems of Browne’s day, we now have animals projected back to us as models of human behaviour. The dolphin was once emblematic of speed or haste, often depicted in conjunction with an anchor, ‘implying that common moral, Festina lente’, as Browne explains. Now, though, it is our aquatic doppelgänger, an icon of animal intelligence, dominant in its environment, but also innocent and playful, like Man before the Fall. Both images are false.
What hope is there for ‘rewilding’ ourselves if we cannot even see these creatures accurately for what they are in the wild – in their wild? And what hope is there that we will learn to regard animals neither as objects nor as quasi-persons, but as animals, animals in an ecosystem that we share? ‘The world was made to be inhabited by beasts,’ Browne wrote, ‘but studied and contemplated by man: ’tis the debt of our reason wee owe unto God, and the homage wee pay for not being beasts.’
incontrovertible (PE, 1646): Browne employs this word in a meditation on the death of Aristotle. According to legend, Aristotle drowned in the Euripus Strait in the Aegean Sea. Frustrated that he could not understand its ever-changing currents, he threw himself in, exclaiming: ‘If I cannot grasp you, then you must claim me.’
Browne does not want to believe this story largely for sentimental reasons. His hero has taken a desperate step, far out of proportion to the analytical defeat he has suffered, for Browne notes that on other occasions Aristotle happily went along with ‘high improbabilities’, such as the idea that birds dwell in the sun, where they gain their colours. Why, if he felt unable to resign himself to their complexity and mystery, did the great philosopher not just think up some equally fanciful explanation for the tangled Euripus currents? From his desk in Norwich, Browne puzzles over the currents himself. How complicated can they really be? Finding no discussion of the problem in Aristotle’s works, and no reliable description of the geographical feature in his classical sources, he begins to doubt their existence at all. The story depends on the supposed fact that the tide ebbs and flows many times in a day, and this, Browne concludes lamely, ‘is not incontrovertible’.
